More built-in pedagogy focuses on historical thinking. Every special feature — whether based on documents, visuals, historiography, biography, or global perspectives — now includes questions that take students from reading history to doing history: questioning, debating, and writing about historical issues. In addition, new "Linking to the Past" questions at the end of each chapter send students back to earlier chapters, helping them to understand cause and effect, compare historical episodes, and consider change over time.
New and important scholarship provides fresh perspectives on historical events. To keep The American Promise thorough, balanced, and up-to-date, recent historical scholarship has been added on such topics as the dominance of the Comanche in the American southwest, the internal slave trade, Southern white women and the rise of the Lost Cause, the 1918 influenza epidemic, and the Obama presidency.
New "Visualizing History" features guide students through the process of analyzing visual documents as historical evidence. Up-close studies of dozens of images — such as Native American artifacts, Jacob Riis photographs, and 1960s clothing styles — stress the importance of considering visuals in context and asking critical questions in order to reach conclusions about the past.
Enhanced media resources provide options for saving time and improving student learning. We know that the classroom changes every year, and so do our resources. The media resources accompanying The American Promise make it the most teachable textbook available and include substantive lecture and video presentation materials, free online student quizzing, plentiful and improved test questions, and free primary documents. Delivery options include PowerPoint, DVD, or in uploadable formats that integrate with local course management systems. Our customizable course space, HistoryClass, contains a complete set of resources, and may be visited at yourhistoryclass.com.